This is a Golden Age for health care. But at the same time new treatments and cures are being developed, Americans are properly concerned about costs. How can the health care system continue to innovate while providing value?
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Our NewsletterIssue No. 56: Study Shows How Prescription Drugs Can Be Key to Constraining Other Health Care Costs
A new study confirms that medicines are often lower-cost alternatives to expensive and sometimes dangerous procedures. In addition, other research shows how medicines allow patients to avoid other treatments that involve further doctor visits, hospital stays, and much greater costs. The new study, a seven-year clinical trial, called ISCHEMIA, drew significant attention globally. It found that people with severe but stable heart disease from clogged arteries cut their risk of having a heart attack over the next few years just as much by using medicines as by having surgery. “Stents and bypass surgery are no more effective than drugs for stable heart disease, highly anticipated trial results show,” said the Washington Post in a Nov. 16 headline. According to the Associated Press: The results challenge medical dogma and call into question some of the most common practices in heart care. They are the strongest evidence yet that tens of thousands of costly stent procedures and bypass operations each year are unnecessary for people with stable disease. Percutaneous coronary angioplasty (PTCA) – which opens up blocked arteries in order to increase circulation to the heart – is the second-most-common operating-room procedure in America during a hospital stay (after knee surgery), with 534,000 operations, according to H-CUP, the federal Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. Coronary bypass surgery is also common, ranking 14th with 203,000 operations. Heart procedures are expensive. H-CUP data show that in 2015, a PTCA cost an average of $92,000 – almost doubling in ten years. A fairly simple coronary intervention with drug-eluding stents (propping open arteries and releasing medicine internally) cost an average of $26,000 for the initial hospitalization and a total of $57,000 including costs for outpatient visits and complications, according to the California Technology Assessment Forum. For bypass surgery, the costs are $34,000 and $61,000. Unfortunately, getting reliable information on hospital costs can be difficult, and these figures are from 2013, but the price trajectory is up while that of heart-disease medicines is down. Read More Here. |
What Others Are Saying"The anger directed at the pharmaceutical and biotech industries overall is misdirected. The single biggest driving force for increased health-care spending in the U.S. is the rising cost of labor, not drugs." "Even if pharmaceutical spending were rising as a share of total health care spending, but that rise was due to pharmaceutical investments driving down expenditures in other health care areas (e.g. a reduced need for more expensive surgeries), then it would still be inaccurate to argue that pharmaceutical spending is driving overall health care inflation." |
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Cost-of-Health-Care News (CHCN) was launched on November 30, 2016, with the aim of providing news and analysis regarding a critical public-policy concern: the costs and pricing of health care. CHCN is published by EAH Strategies, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich. CHCN is supported by Pfizer.